Category: Time Management

What Would You Do with an Extra Half Day a Week?

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

Our clients save, on average, half a day a week by handing off the repetitive social media tasks to Ausoma.

What could you do with an extra half a day a week?

You could spend more time on other tasks you feel aren’t getting your full attention now.

You could spend time on Quadrant 2 activities, those tasks which are important, but not urgent, and therefore fall to the bottom of every tasklist ever written.

Would you have time to take on another client?

Maybe you’d spend more time with family. I know I would.

You could write a book. If you write at my pace, you’d have a 60,000-word book done in two years without taking time from anything else.

Save up the half days until you have a couple and take a long weekend, a short vacation.

Or perhaps take a continuing education course and your local community college, or online.

Time it right and attend a conference.

Spend the time broadening your horizons by learning a language.

Broaden your horizons in a different way and take art classes or learn to play a musical instrument.

Your budget may not allow you to hire someone to manage your social media for you. We get that. If it does, though, what would you do with an extra half day a week?

I Can’t Spend All My Time Marketing!

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

And you don’t have to. You shouldn’t. Marketing, rather than being a flood of information about you and yours, should be a steady drip, drip, drip, like watering a delicate plant, not hosing down an elephant.

I’ve spent my adult life working with automation and efficiency using computers so any time there’s a task with repeatable steps, I look for a way to make those repeating parts automatic. It allows me to spend my time on the unique bits, the parts I can do better than a computer because they require creativity or special knowledge.

Automating and scheduling your online marketing is smart. Create messages (that’s the ‘unique to you’ bit) and schedule them in a single monthly session. (We use and recommend Hootsuite but there are a number of social media automation tools available.)

You still have to check in daily to interact with the real human beings who touch your social media messages, but you don’t have to be online 24/7 to keep your message (remember those 80/20 principles, both of them) in front of potential readers and fans.

The 80/20 Principle in Social Media Marketing

Posted on by Sue L Canfield

How does the 80/20 principle apply in social media marketing? In short, it means that about 20% of your messages are self-promotion, ‘buy-my-book’ messages and 80% of your messages are generous, sharing what your audience finds valuable and informative.

This is important for authors trying to promote their books. If your audience sees the majority of your messages are self-promotion, they will quickly lose interest. Turn that around. Make the majority of your messages generous, information sharing.

Ask yourself: what does my reader want? What does my reader need? Then share! What you share can be tips from your book. That will encourage your audience to buy your book whether or not you specifically promote it. Also share links to other helpful information provided from other sources.

The 80/20 numbers are not carved in stone. It’s not a rule. It’s a principle. The important thing is to remember this principle in all your social media marketing.

Share more than you promote.

Note from Joel

While this is not really an application of the Pareto Principle wherein most of our results come from a small portion of our effort, it’s convenient to reuse the numbers 80 and 20 partly because they’ll be easy to remember. But hey, perhaps we’ll write another post about applying the Pareto Principle in your marketing efforts, because it definitely applies.

The Super Bowl is Over. Let’s Get Back to Marketing.

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

Every year we notice a slump from the beginning of December through the weekend of the Super Bowl. In December, everyone spends their money on things other than business expenses. Then, in January, everyone stops spending altogether.

We’ve learned over the years that December is the natural time for us to spend a week off work, analyzing the year’s activities, what worked well and why, and planning for the coming year. We set business and personal goals, then follow up all year long, monthly, quarterly, and again at year end.

We’ve also learned that expending effort marketing in January can be a complete waste of time—if we do it wrong. January is the time to keep it very personal, stay on people’s radar, share freely, to make our marketing message “We understand you’re not ready right now, but when you are, we’ll be ready, too, and here’s why we might be a good match when it’s time.” (That’s not as succinct as I’d like.)

It’s the Tuesday after the big game, and things are going to get back to normal. That means marketing can serve not just to stay on folks’ radar, but to educate and attract, moving the right people toward our offerings, turning into the fun and games of doing business. (If you’re not having fun marketing your book and your business, let’s talk, shall we?)

Timer (#3 of 6 Tools to Get You Writing)

Posted on by Joel D Canfield
#3 of 6 tools to get you writing instead of whimpering in the fetal position on the closet floor.

Being passionate souls, writers have a tendency to over promise, over commit and just plain try too hard.

When facing a challenging task, it’s human nature to try to swallow the elephant in one gulp. Every “getting things done” specialist in the world tells us that’s wrong — and yet we persist. If you want a jump start on eating the elephant, start with one tiny bite.

If you’re 12 years behind on your book, it’s easy to assume that it will take four hours a day for the next 10 years to catch up. And what happens is you spend four hours a day worrying about writing and zero hours a day doing it. If you missed yesterday’s post on habits and rituals go back and read it. Then we’ll talk about why a 5-minute timer is such a great habit-building tool.

This all-or-nothing perspective makes habit-building a real challenge. … more … “Timer (#3 of 6 Tools to Get You Writing)”